


Captivity

by kindkit



Category: Colditz (1972)
Genre: Charlotte Bronte would probably not approve, Community: kink_bingo, Fantasy, M/M, Prisoner of War, Roleplay, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-28
Updated: 2012-10-28
Packaged: 2017-11-17 06:26:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/548587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imagination, <em>Jane Eyre</em>, and a kind of liberty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captivity

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Kink Bingo "roleplay" prompt.
> 
> Set in the autumn of 1944. You can probably read this without having seen _Colditz_ ; [this post](http://kindkit.dreamwidth.org/184436.html) will give some sense of the characters. If you have seen _Colditz_ , I should mention that the exercise park in this story resembles the spacious, hilly one at the historical Colditz more than the tiny litte space shown on the TV show. Finally, like all my _Colditz_ stories, this owes a lot to Halotolerant and our many, many discussions.

"This is my favourite spot," Harry says, as the hill they've been walking down dips to its lowest point. "The wire's out of sight, here. It's possible to imagine one's somewhere else."

"Where would you be, if you could?" The question used to be a common pastime, George remembers, back in the winter of 1940-41. Rations were short, Red Cross parcels scarce, and when the POWs weren't talking about food, they conjured up faraway places. Then the war stretched on and the men seemed to start narrowing their imaginations, flinching from the pain of contrast. Now, as the war enters its sixth year, only new prisoners and irrepressibly dreamy ones like Harry talk about anywhere that isn't Colditz or the slowly advancing Allied front lines.

"Must I choose?" Harry's free arm gestures towards infinity, while his other arm stays tucked under George's. "I should like to travel after the war. Greece, Egypt, Russia, China. Borneo! Argentina! The Yukon! What do you say?"

"Anything you like." 

"Round the world in 80 days . . . no, that's far too fast. Eighty months, perhaps." Harry smiles playfully. They both know this is a fantasy. When they're free, when their world isn't bounded by barbed wire and sentries, it will be bounded by money instead. George will have to leave his job at the bank if he wants to stay with Harry, and Harry, who enlisted at eighteen, has never had a job, only an allowance from a father who will expect Harry to join the family firm and marry a suitable girl. Being together will have a cost in the most literal sense. They're going to be poor.

"Eighty years," George suggests. "We'll be nomads, crossing the east by camel and the Pacific by slow ship."

"You'd miss England eventually. So would I. And it's England I think of the most, to tell the truth. Especially out here. It's easier to imagine the exercise park as English countryside than Greek."

"'Oh, to be in England, when' . . . how does the rest go?"

"'Now that April's there.' And then he talks about spring flowers and leaves. We're out of season. Pity Browning didn't write one for October." 

Coming to the top of the next low hill, they pass Tim Downing circling the park at his usual athletic jog. He nods in the faintly puzzled way he's had ever since George started preferring Harry to games. They also see Griffiths, MacLeod, and Harris about thirty yards ahead, and slow down so as not to meet them. These hours in the exercise park are the only time it's possible to have even the illusion of solitude for long.

"The poor old park is rather barren, I suppose," George says. "Even in April." Back in 1940 the park was full of trees, but they've mostly been cut down and their wood burned in Colditz's kitchens and staff quarters. Now there are stumps, undergrowth, and what dead leaves blow in from more fortunate countryside.

"I sometimes think of it as the moors. Brontë country."

"Cathy and Heathcliff's ghosts fluttering about on windy nights?"

"If you like. I prefer _Jane Eyre_ 's moors around Thornfield. They're kinder, I think, and a good deal less haunted. A pleasant enough place to go walking."

George tries to imagine Harry striding across windswept northern moors. It's not easy. For one thing, George has never been further north than Derby, and for another, he's never known Harry outside of Colditz. Everything they've meant to each other is framed by one smallish castle and half a mile of exercise park. 

"You look very thoughtful," Harry says.

"I was picturing you as, well, John Eyre I suppose. The innocent orphan, fresh from school - "

" - come to tutor the ward of the mysterious Mr. Rochester? That would be you, by the way."

"Ugly, rude, and domineering? Thanks awfully." With the part of his attention that's always on food, George spies a dot of red among dead leaves, and ventures off into the brush to pick a few withered rose hips. "We'll brew them up tonight," he says as he returns, slipping them into his pocket and linking his arm with Harry's again.

"They taste foul. At times I think scurvy might be preferable."

"There were a couple of chaps who got scurvy, back in '40. Their teeth fell out."

"Yes, all right, point taken." A gust of wind makes Harry shiver; George brings his arm closer to his body, trying to keep Harry's hand warm in its worn-thin mitten with the hole at the thumb. "You know I don't think you're ugly or rude or domineering . . . well, perhaps a little domineering on the subject of vitamins. What I meant was that there's a . . . a sadness in him, a loneliness that he hides and no one notices but Jane."

"No wonder he'll do anything to keep her, once he's found her. Even bigamy." George thinks of his wife, who is the furthest imaginable sort of person from mad Bertha Mason in the attic. She's just a gentle old-fashioned girl with the bad luck to have married a man who didn't yet know that he was a homosexual. George hasn't told her that he's leaving her. He's mentioned Harry once or twice in his letters to her, calling him a "chum." His letters are unrevealing, laboured, schoolboyish things. They play down Harry and Colditz, joy and misery and hunger and anxiety, and they must be dull to read. Her letters are bright and full of cheerful stories of life in the WRNS. They're friendly letters, the sort she might write to a distant relation. 

George slips his arm around Harry's waist and leans in a little, wanting to kiss him, wanting to clutch at him until they're as close as skin and bones allow. They'll have to find some privacy tonight, somehow. "Do they go for long walks, your John Eyre and Mr. Rochester?"

"Oh, yes." Harry's arm circles him, and they move awkwardly forward in a half-embrace that George hopes is on the right side of discretion. Everyone must know about them, but an unstated and avoidable knowledge is different from a public declaration. He doesn't want to test the forbearance they've been shown in this constrained little world. "Even when it's cold. They walk for miles over the moors, talking about everything, feeling free and happy because they're alone together. That's how they come to kiss for the first time."

They're in an inconspicuous place, a curve in the path at the bottom of a hill. George looks around, sees no one but the backs of the group in front of them, and quickly kisses Harry on the corner of his mouth. "Is it worth it to them? All the difficulties they go through, all the unhappiness?"

"I'm sure it's worth it to John. Is it worth it to Rochester?"

"Always. Even when he's afraid of . . . of scandal, of hurting people, and he's terribly aware that he doesn't deserve someone to trust him and love him as John does, and he can't quite believe that he can really keep John forever against all the odds, not ruin it through foolishness or let the world ruin it for them both - "

"They'll be all right," Harry says with certainty. "Remember how the story ends. Nothing can keep them apart, not with the tie that's between them."

"They'll have a house together - "

" - a little flat in London - "

" - and take long walks on Hampstead Heath - "

"Rochester will run away from the bank and train to be a painter and John will be . . . something - "

"Whatever he wants, because he's a clever boy."

"And the war will be over and they'll be free."

"With plenty to eat and warm clothes to wear on their walks."

"And a big bed to come home to, after."

Harry laughs. "I knew we'd get to that eventually."

"Those Victorian novels may neglect to mention it, but it's awfully important." George spreads his fingers out along Harry's side, thinking of the skin underneath. He'll kiss him there, the first chance he gets. "The glider workroom, tonight?"

"Yes. We'll have to bring all our blankets and hope Ulmann doesn't pop in for a dormitory inspection."

"It'll be _atmospheric_ cold. We can imagine we're John and Rochester, making love out on the moors."

Harry makes a soft sound that's partway between a laugh and one of his gasps when George is kissing him. "All alone, miles away from anyone else."

"Someday we'll - " _Be really alone,_ George is about to say. _Our bed, our flat, and we'll save up for a holiday on the moors or in the Highlands and I will lay you down in the heather and keep you warm with my body._ But he's interrupted by blare of the guards' whistles signalling that the exercise period is over. It's time to go back to another night in Colditz.


End file.
